Talks About Books

The Weekly Machen

A couple of items found in the following article should be of interest to Machen readers. His great respect for Persian language and poetry, as well as the work in that field by Professor Browne, and which influenced Machen to pen “The Rose Garden,” resurfaces again. (For more on that topic see A Reader of Curious Books and Mist and Mystery.) In this article, we discover that Machen and Browne met, or at least corresponded. The mystery of Elizabeth Canning, also a favorite curiosity for Machen, is briefly summarized here, but will later receive longer treatment, perhaps too long, with his full-length book, The Canning Wonder (1926). 

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Talks About Books
by
Arthur Machen
November 20, 1912

Amongst chronic controversies there is none in which I take greater pleasure than the “compulsory Greek” quarrel. Every now and then—once a month or so, I should suppose—somebody says that Greek should not be compulsory at the Universities. Most people agree with him; and, indeed, the anti-Greek arguments are strong enough. It has been shown over and over again that a knowledge of the Greek chorus in metres has never helped anybody to cook a goose or to job a stock; and when that is once said, the majority considers that there is no more to be said. If Greek neither ministers to cooking geese nor cooking accounts: what is the use of Greek?

I differ profoundly, from the majority, as I usually do. I have often told the anti-Greeks that I would not only preserve compulsory Greek, but would add to it compulsory Persian; and Mr. Claud Field’s “Persian Literature” (Herbert and Daniel) confirms me in this position, and makes me wish that somebody had compelled me to study Sadi Hafiz and Jalaluddin at an early age.

For the more remote in time, manner, interests, subjects, and construction the language from our own tongue, so much the more valuable is it as an instrument and vehicle of real education. Thus Latin is more educative than French, Greek than Latin, and—as I am prepared to maintain— Persian than Greek. As the body is refreshed and benefited by being transported suddenly from air to water by way of a cold bath, so the plunge into a strange Oriental tongue will refresh and invigorate the mind.

Mr. Field’s excellent compendium of the literature of Persia shows clearly our mistake in taking Omar Khayyam as the typical Persian poet, almost the only Persian poet. As Professor Browne, of Cambridge, once told me, it is not absolutely certain that any one of the famous quatrains was written by Omar, and so naturally enough the Persians cannot make out our enthusiasm for one whom they regard as more of an astronomer than a poet. I suppose the truth is that the enthusiasm is more for the work of Fitzgerald than the doubtful original of Omar.

The Spirit of the East

The chief peculiarity of Persian poetry is, it seems to me, its sensuous mysticism. This is an old spirit in the East, and the most beautiful example of it is familiar to us as the Song of Solomon. Love, the Lover, the Beloved, Wine and the Wine Cup, the Tavern and its Keeper; these are the great words in the lips of the mystic poets of the East. Sometimes, no doubt, they are to be taken in their literal sense; but often the earthly is put for the heavenly, the part for the whole of which it is the dim and broken reflection.

What is your favourite criminal trial? I am all for the case of Madeleine Smith myself, though I think there is a great deal to be said for the Campden mystery, out of which Mr. Masefield made a play. Madeleine Smith’s process was rich in elements of horror, and of something more horrible than horror; but there was not much mystery about it. The Campden tragedy, on the other hand, is rich in mysteries; which never will be solved, since the three innocent people were hanged more than two hundred years ago. We shall never know what the missing steward was doing during the two years of his absence, we shall never know why a man denounced himself, his mother, and his brother as guilty of a murder which had not happened; the Campden Wonder will be always wonderful.

Third in order of merit I think I would place the mystery of Elizabeth Canning, toId in “Romantic Trials of Three Centuries,” by Mr. Hugh Childers. (Lane.) This—in the briefest, driest outline—is the story of the wandering Elizabeth. She was a servant girl in Aldermanbury, and on New Year’s Day, 1753, she paid a visit to an uncle and aunt in Whitechapel. In the evening she set out to return to Aldermanbury, and her relations accompanied her as far to Houndsditch. She returned, not to her master, but to her mother, on January 29, almost dead, black and blue, and dressed in an old dirty, ragged bedgown; her ear was bleeding.

Elizabeth said that she had been set on by two ruffians in Moorfields; they had dragged her to a house eleven miles from London on the Hertford road, where she had been imprisoned in a dark hayloft and almost starved to death. To use a polite modern phrase, the girl’s gaolers were engaged, according to her, in the “White Slave Traffic”; but Elizabeth, being virtuous, would have none of their proposals. She had at last succeeded in escaping through a window.

The Wrong House

There was a house, and a house of no extraordinary repute, it appeared about eleven miles from London on the Hertford road, and though Elizabeth Canning’s descriptions of it were quite inaccurate, some of the occupants, including an old gipsy woman, were arrested and tried. The gipsy was condemned to death, and would doubtless have been hanged—if she had not succeeded in producing a host of witnesses who proved that she had been in Dorsetshire at the time of the alleged abduction. So Mary Squires was set free, and Elizabeth Canning was sentenced to seven years transportation for perjury. It is a pretty case enough.

“A Rip Van Winkle of 1810, waking, say in 1850 would have been completely bewildered by the steam-engine; but he might have past the rest of his life in conversation which he would have enjoyed and found reasonably familiar. A Rip Van Winkle of 1870, waking in 1910, while he would have grasped the principle of the motor-car in twenty minutes, would never have been on conversational terms with his neighbours; he would constantly have found he did not know what they were talking about.” Thus Mr. R. H. Gretton, author of “A Modern History of the English People” (Grant, Richards), points out the great change that has taken place not so much in things as in people during the last thirty years.

I wonder whether he is right, since I myself can well remember that far-off misty past which we call the early ‘eighties, and I do not feel that there has been any violent gulf in the path between 1880 and 1910. In the main, the great change that strikes me, looking backwards, is the decline and almost the disappearance of the old cocksure materialism, which used to be urged so violently by the scientific people, and opposed by the crude and unintelligent literalism of the churchfolk.

The author has noted this great change; under the year 1892 he shows us the Duke of Argyll, Mr. Gladstone, and Professor Huxley “solemnly debating whether men should or should not believe in God, since the Book of Genesis shows no knowledge of the existence of kangaroos, and the story of Creation is demonstrably unsound in the matter of the greater saurians.”

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